Traditional Studies in Contemporary Iran

Conference report by Youna Eskandari

An international conference entitled "René Guénon and the Revival of the Primordial Tradition" was held on February 17–18, 2026 at the Iranian Institute of Philosophy (IRIP) in Tehran. Originally founded by Seyyed Hossein Nasr in 1974, the institute still hosts enthusiastic readers of René Guénon, notably Babak Alikhani, the scientific secretary of the conference, who leads an annual seminar on Guénon for Iranian students, and Dr. Esmaeil Radpour, co-organiser of the conference and scholar of Chinese esoteric traditions.

Over two days, the papers explored a remarkable range of themes: the desacralisation of psychology, the symbolism of the Companions of the Cave, orientalism and orientality, counter‑tradition, Traditionalist political theory, initiation and socratic education, the symbolism of theatre, Iranian primordial tradition and Shi'a gnosis, the doctrinal function of Michel Valsan, Chinese esotericism, and even the symbolism of the traditional Iranian instrument, the santur. The full programme is available here.

What struck me most was not the thematic diversity but the epistemological attitude towards Guénon himself. In the Western academic world, any discussion on Guénon is typically marked by external critique, historical contextualisation, or outright dismissal. Scholars feel compelled to distance themselves from his "Traditionalist" positions, to deconstruct his claims, or to reduce him to a footnote of esoteric eccentricity. In Tehran, by contrast, Guénon was not studied externally or critically; his thought was accepted a priori, as a valid framework to be applied, developed, or revived.

As the organisers explicitly stated in the description of the conference published online: "Organizing a conference aimed at clarifying the contributions of the French metaphysician René Guénon is not born out of amusement, but of a deep sense of urgency and necessity." The intent was to "awaken and revitalize… the Iranian civilization by restoring its rightful stature among the diverse civilizations." This objective, they say, can only be realized through the revivification, commentary and elucidation of the works of René Guénon, described as a "great sage of our era." This is no small matter, for this exercise took place in Iran, the land where, as the organisers remind us, Suhrawardî, the master of illuminative metaphysics, expressed in his own terms the idea of the primordial tradition: al-khamîrah al-azaliyyah (the eternal leaven). As the conference organisers wrote: "It does not seem difficult to understand that the oriental metaphysics referred to by René Guénon is fundamentally one with the oriental metaphysics (al-hikmat al-mashriqiyya) of Avicenna—and especially with the illuminative metaphysics (ḥikmat al-ishrâq) of Suhrawardî." One could even say that this redeems the university, or rather elevates it to the true worth of its name, for universitas means "whole, totality, universe." In its very etymology, the university carries the ideal of universality. In Tehran, that ideal was realised, the university fulfilled its finality by being an echo of the primordial Tradition, that Knowledge which embraces the totality of all knowledges in their common principle.

One could thus say this was a profoundly "Oriental" conference, in Guénon's own sense of the word, meaning traditional, and it was accomplished in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The proceedings of the conference are to be published in 2027 in the Institute’s journal, aptly titled Sophia Perennis, additional proof, if any were needed, that Guénon’s thought remains alive in Iran.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr and friends

At the age of 94, Seyyed Hossein Nasr has formally retired, and this was marked by a meeting at Geroge Washington University with many speakers, including Nasr himself. The entire meeting was filmed, as is available on YouTube, here. It lasted six hours and forty-three minutes, so it will be some time before I can go through it all, but it provides a rich source for those interested in Nasr, as well as a fitting tribute to a great thinker.

My thanks to Ali Mohammad Eskandari Joo for drawing this to my attention.

René Guénon and Henry Corbin

A recent publication, New Perspectives on Henry Corbin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), edited by Hadi Fakhoury, available here, has prompted me to reflect on the relationship between Corbin (pictured left) and Guénon.

At first sight, Corbin and Guénon were very different types of people. Corbin was a scholar who spent his life within French academia, occupying several prestigious posts. Guénon was rejected by French academia, and spent his life outside it, often criticizing it. On the other hand, their paths did somehow cross, given the close relationship between Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and the Italian scholar Francesco Piraino has recently drawn our attention to their very similar contemporary impact: reading Corbin, like reading Guénon, is often important for the trajectories of French converts to Sufi Islam. The Traditionalist author Patrick Laude has written about Corbin together with Guénon and Schuon (see here).

Fakhoury’s volume helps make clear where Corbin and Guénon agreed and where they differed. Firstly, Corbin was not a self-distancing academic scholar. He was never just a historian of ideas, or even a philosopher in the normal sense. He engaged actively in the exploration of the human relationship with the transcendent, and was as interested in actual spiritual experience as in written attempts to explain it. Secondly, he was in many ways a perennialist, believing in an “Oriental” or “Iranian” “Hellenism” that included Zoroastrianism, Plato, Proclus, Suhrawardi, and Ibn Arabi—not as a succession of historical figures, but as ways of accessing truth. Thirdly, the distinction between esoteric and exoteric was central to his thought, as was—to a lesser extent—initiation. Fourthly, he had a low opinion of the modern West, preferring Oriental Hellenism to “Latinism,” and seeing modernity as lamentably desacralized. Finally, at least towards the end of his life, he sought for surviving transmissions of what Guénon would have called the primordial tradition in ancient orders (the Order of St Jean of Jerusalem) and Freemasonry. Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s chapter on “Henry Corbin as Knight of the Temple” in Fakhoury’s volume sheds much light on this quest.

And yet Corbin’s perennialism was not Guénon’s. Even if Corbin was never just a scholar, he worked on original texts in their original languages with considerable scholarly rigor. When it came to perennialism, Corbin was interested in Christianity and Iranian Hellenism, while Guénon was interested in Hinduism and Arab Islam. Corbin was a Protestant, and Guénon abhorred Protestantism. Corbin valued Plato, and Guénon did not. Guénon’s perennialism derived from Theosophy, while Corbin’s (perennial) Hellenism derived from the Russian Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky (1893-1979). The esoteric/exoteric pair is hard to avoid if one looks in certain areas of Islam, and while Corbin’s esoteric was located primarily in what he famously termed the mundus imaginalis, the “imaginary” between the realm of the forms and the experiential world, Guénon’s esoteric was mostly in the teachings of the primordial tradition. For Guénon, anti-modernism was primary, but for Corbin it was secondary.

In the end, the two men were also of different generations. Most of Corbin’s (1903-1978) work was published after Guénon’s death in 1951. Corbin's crucial Sohravardi d’Alep, fondateur de la doctrine illuminative was published in 1939, but—presumably because of the disruption caused by the Second World War—was not reviewed in Études traditionnelles until 1947. And even then it received only one (rather dismissive) paragraph, which can be read here.

Against the Modern World in Persian

 

Against the Modern World is now available in Persian, as ستیز با جهان مدرن (سنت‌گرایی و تاریخ فکری پنهان سدۀ بیستم), published by نشرنو in Tehran. Many thanks to Alireza Bashardoost and Sina Bastani, who pursued this project despite many obstacles. The translation includes a short preface written for the Iranian edition.

Copies available from https://nashrenow.com/product/against-the-modern-world/.

Guénon returns to Iran

An international conference on "René Guénon and the Revival of the Primordial Tradition" will be held February 17-18, 2025 by the department of Religious Studies at the Iranian Institute of Philosophy (IRIP). The Iranian Institute of Philosophy was founded by Seyyed Hossein Nasr in 1974 as the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy and was for many years the center of Traditionalist thought not only in Iran but on a global scale. When Nasr left Iran and the Academy, its character changed.

Nasr, however, is now the first name on the list of the International Scientific Committee for the forthcoming conference, along with other international scholars such as Philippe Faure, editor of the collective volume René Guénon, l'appel de la sagesse primordiale (René Guénon: the call of primordial wisdom, 2015). The main scientific committee is headed by former Iranian collaborators of Nasr such as Gholamreza Avani and Shahram Pazouki. The first-named scientific secretary is Babak Alikhani, author of “René Guénon and Ancient Iranian Culture,” published in Alikhani’s book Roshnaii nameh (Book of illumination, 2024).

That such a conference is to be held in Iran, at the former Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, and involving Nasr is a major event. For those who would like to participate, the conference website is at https://guenon.irip.ac.ir/ (scroll down for actual call). There is a wide list of conference themes, the conference will be held both in-person and virtually, and the submission deadline is 14 November 2024, at which point full papers of 8,000 words are required.

My thanks to MM for bringing this conference to my attention.

New book on Shi’i Traditionalists in Italy

A new book has just been published on Shi’i Traditionalists in Italy. It is Crises and Conversions: The Unlikely Avenues of “Italian Shiism”, by Minoo Mirshahvalad, available here.

The book has three sections, though they are not explicitly identified as such. The first section introduces Evolian Traditionalism, paying especial attention to Evola’s views on Islam. The second tells the almost unknown story of the rise and flourishing of Shi’i Traditionalism, and the third looks at various issues and contradictions arising from this.

The book is based on careful readings of relevant texts and on high-quality ethnographic fieldwork, and is beautifully written, with an excellent eye for revealing detail.

The rise of Shi’i Traditionalism in Italy starts with Pio Filippani-Ronconi (1920-2010), an Italian Orientalist who integrated Julius Evola and the very pro-Iranian views of the great French Orientalist Henry Corbin. Having first read Evola in 1934, Filippani-Ronconi remained true to his principals throughout his life, including a period serving in the Waffen-SS, where he reached the rank of Obersturmführer (second lieutenant). But it as a pro-Shi’i Orientalist, not as an SS officer, that he matters. Mirshahvalad also discusses the early roles of Adriano Romualdi (1940-1973), the son of Pino Romualdi (1913-1988), the leader of the MSI, Italy’s largest and most important Neo-Fascist movement, and of Claudio Mutti (born 1946), who is already known to students of Italian Traditionalism.

For the flourishing of Shi’i Traditionalism, Mirshahvalad introduces us to three Italian organizations, the Ahl al-Bayt Association in Naples, the Dimore della Sapienza (houses of wisdom, DDS) in Rome, and the lower-profile Tarsis in Trieste. The Ahl al-Bayt Association was founded by Luigi Ammar de Martino (1964-2019), who as a young man belonged to the Evolian activist (and terrorist) group Ordine Nuovo, converted to Sunni Islam in 1982, and then to Shi’i Islam in 1983, one of many in Italy to follow this pattern, which can be seen as representing a shift from the more standard Guénonian position to a less standard position based on a specifically Italian reading of Evola.

Beyond these three organizations there is also a more general sympathy with Iranian Shi’ism on the Italian Right represented, for example, by the production by members of CasaPound, perhaps Italy’s highest profile Far Right group, of posters commemorating the death of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, part of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, assassinated by an American drone in 2020.

The third part of the book, as has been said, looks at various issues and contradictions arising from the sometimes uncomfortable alliance of Evola, Shi’ism, and the Iranian state. Mirshahvalad starts with culture, which she describes as “the Achilles’ heel” of the Shi’i Traditionalists, and Traditionalists in general. This issue has been dealt with by other scholars before, but never quite as directly and as clearly as by Mirshahvalad. Esra Özyürek, for example, wrote in 2014 of the ambivalent relations between German converts to Islam and immigrant Muslims in Germany. The point that Mirshahvalad makes is that for both Guénon and Evola, what mattered was the tradition, and culture was a human creation, not part of the tradition. But of course whatever Guénon and Evola thought, scholars of religion know that religion and culture are interwoven. the Shi’i Traditionalists generally try to keep religion and culture separate: “Converts’ Shiism is not a family heritage but an attempt for crafting a shield against modernity. This shield is fabricated independently from Shi’ism in its original contexts.” But it is not always so easy. “My wife is Iranian … but we are not Iranians, we are Italians,” one informant told Mirshahvalad. One wonders.

A number of other issues are considered, including the way that Shi’i Traditionalists often ignore central features of Iranian Shi’ism, from gender segregation to the all-important institutions of the marjiʿ  and the hawza, the foundations of Iranian Islamic authority and among the most important things that make Shi’i Islam different from Sunni Islam in the first place. An equally important question that is discussed is the way in which the view that Shi’i Traditionalists have of Iran differs in many ways from the view that most Iranians now have, a view which binds them tightly to the ever more discredited conservative leadership. There is also a brief but convincing discussion of what the Iranian state and leadership gain from their relationship with Italy’s Shi’i Traditionalists

All in all, a fascinating book, strongly recommended.

Traditionalism and Iranian music

A new PhD thesis discusses the role of tradition, and thus Traditionalism, in Iranian music. It is by Kamyar Nematollahy, entitled “Iranian Classical Music Since the 1970s: The Discourses of Tradition and Identity,” and was submitted at the University of Cologne, from whose website it is available (link here). 

Nematollahy identifies a long-running discussion about tradition and modernity in Iranian music, termed سنت or sonnat (tradition) and تجدد or tajaddod (modernity). He shows that in the musical context, the word sonnat has three distinct but overlapping meanings: one theological, one Traditionalist, and one general. The theological meaning is the same as the meaning of the Arabic word سنة or sunna, meaning the practices of the prophet Muhammad. The general meaning is the same as the English word modernity. The Traditionalist meaning is that given it by Seyyed Hossein Nasr in the early 1970s, and is “the transmission of certain sacred, transcendent, and immutable rules and concepts.” Most of those who use the term in the ongoing debate, however, do not distinguish these three meanings as carefully as Nematollahy does, or indeed distinguish them at all. Perhaps something needs to be added to my standard distinction between “hard” and “soft” Traditionalism: accidental Traditionalism?

Heidegger, Traditionalism, and Iranian theories of art

A new chapter in a collection on Heidegger in the Islamicate World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) discusses the impact of Heidegger and on post-revolutionary Iranian art theory, and on the art theory of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the Traditionalist successor of Frithjof Schuon in the United States. It is “Heidegger’s Role in the Formation of Art Theory in Contemporary Iran” by Amir Nasri, an Iranian scholar (pp. 55-67).

Nasri’s starting point is the Hawza-i andishe ve hunari islami (School of Islamic Thought and Art), known for short as the Hawza-i hunari (School of Art), the Tehran-based organization that in Nasri's view was “the most important artistic school of the first decade after the revolution.” The Hawza-i hunari’s art theory was, according to Nasri, impacted especially by three pre-revolutionary intellectuals: Ahmad Fardid (1910-94), Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933), and Daryush Shayegan (1935-2018). All three were in turn impacted by the great French Iranologist, Henry Corbin (1903-78), who was himself a follower of Heidegger.

Fardid, who was a professor of philosophy and Heidegger’s great advocate in Iran, is not now widely known, but it was he, according to Nasri, who was the inventor of the seminal term gharbzadegi (Westoxification or Occidentosis) that was famously popularized by the novelist Jalal Al-e Ahmad. After the revolution, Fardid became an influential theorist in the Islamic Republic; Nasr and Shayegan went into exile, Nasr permanently, but even so were read at the Hawza-i hunari. Nasr, as noted, became a leading Traditionalist; Shayegan moved away from Traditionalism, questioning whether “the tradition” had ever actually existed.

Nasri traces the influence of Heidegger in Corbin’s concept of the “ideal space,” born of Heidegger’s emphasis on the importance of the Origin (Ursprung) in art combined with Suhrawardi’s understanding of the ideal world. For Corbin, the “ideal space” was key to understanding Persian miniature painting. In this he was followed by Nasr and Shayegan, who also cited Heidegger directly while arguing that the art of the East and of the West do not share a common language. Both Nasr and Shayegan thus looked for the revival of Iranian art through the rediscovery of tradition, as did Fardid.

Nasr then combined Corbin's partly Heidegger-derived concept with Guénon's important pair of quality and quantity. The two-dimensional ideal space is, for Nasr, qualitative rather than quantitative: the quantitative leads to naturalism. Nasr's mature argument is not just Traditionalist, then, but also Heideggerian.

Yahya Bonnaud (1957-2019)

Yahya Bonnaud (1957-2019), the Shi'i Franco-Iranian Traditionalist, died on August 26, 2019 in a car accident in Côte d'Ivoire.

Bonnaud encountered the works of Guénon as a young man, and became Muslim in 1979. He studied with the great Malian ethnographer and Tijani Amadou Hampâté Bâ. In 1991, he published Le soufisme : « al-taṣawwuf » et la spiritualité islamique (Sufism: "al-taṣawwuf" and Islamic spirituality) with a preface by the French Traditionalist scholar of Ibn Arabi Michel Chodkiewicz.

While working on a PhD at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris with Henri Corbin, he studied with Sayyed Jalal-ed-Din Ashtiani, an Iranian philosopher who had himself studied under the Ayatollah Khomeini (and who also taught William Chittick). Bonnaud became Shi'i himself. His PhD dissertation was later published as L'Imam Khomeyni, un gnostique méconnu du xxe siècle : métaphysique et théologie dans les œuvres philosophiques et spirituelles de l'Imam Khomeyni (Imam Khomeini, an unrecognised gnostic of the twentieth century: metaphysics and theology in the philosophical and spiritual works of Imam Khomeini).

Bonnaud moved to Iran, where he lived in the city of Mashhad, working on a very scholarly translation of the Quran into French, referring to all the leading classical Shi'i authorities, and using copious notes to summarise his researches and thus the meanings that he had decided to translate. The note explaining the bismillah at the start of the fatiha was nine pages long. He also traveled abroad as an exponent of Shi'ism, and it was on such a mission that he lost his life.

CounterPunch attacks Maryamiyya

An article on the Maryamiyya has just (November 2) been published in CounterPunch, "the fearless voice of the American Left," which "tells the facts and names the names."

The article, "Sufism in the Service of Empire: the Case of the Maryamiyyah" by the Berlin-based Iranian intellectual Wahid Azal, focuses on the Maryamiyya's influence today, after presenting Frithjof Schuon and the Maryamiyya (with an emphasis on the most problematic details in its history) by way of background. The names that Azal names are Prince Charles, Ibrahim Kalin (President Erdoğan's press secretary and associate), Prince Ghazi of Jordan, and Alexander Dugin. He refers to Maryami influence in Morocco, the Gulf, and Saudi Arabia, but without naming names. He then also names names within "the Islamic/Mid East Studies establishment of the Western Ivory Tower" (William Chittick, Terry Moore, Hasan Awan, Reza-Shah Kazemi and Alan Godlas) and in Iran (Gholamreza Avani).

Azal's conclusion is that while Sufism has historically often opposed colonialism and empire, "Western... Sufism has increasingly gone in another direction, allying itself more and more with the agendas of Western establishments and the core interests of Empire in the Muslim world." This, in Azal's view, is true of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Order as well as to the Maryamiyya, and is "as big a betrayal of the ‘Tradition’ as Islamism itself is."

Azal is right about the alliance between much of Western Sufism and Western establishments, though I am not sure about the "core interests of Empire," as I am not sure that "Empire" is a the right way to describe the West today, and as I am also not sure that the West really knows what its core interests in the Muslim world are, which may actually be part of the problem.

I think what really explains the alliance between much of Western Sufism and Western establishments today is the familiar logic that makes a friend of my enemy's enemy. Western Sufis are invariably hostile to Islamism, Salafism and so on, which is generally hostile to them. The so-called Islamic State, for example, has also denounced the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Order, for its theology and for being "quick to ally with any tāghūt [idolators] who will allow them to spread their message," the main idolators being the Americans (Dabiq 14, Rajab 1437 [April 2016], p. 15).

Shared hostility to Islamism and Salafism places much of Western Sufism and Western establishments on the same side. To what extent this is "a betrayal of the ‘Tradition’" by Western Sufis depends on whether one sees Western establishments as traditional, modern, or positively counter-initiatic.

Azal also refers in passing to my Against the Modern World and quotes the allegation of Mark Koslow that, as a result of threats of legal action against Oxford University Press, I "backed down and published a rather weak assessment of Schuon’s polygamous activities, criminal actions, visions of nude Virgins and delusions of grandeur." It is true that I went through the manuscript of Against the Modern World with a lawyer to make sure that everything in the text that was finally published would stand up in court if necessary, and that this necessitated some changes. In the end, however, I still managed to say everything important that I thought needed to be said.

New book on the Maryamiyya (in Persian)

A new book has just been published in Iran: Abdollah Shahbazi,مریمیه: از فریتیوف شوان تا سید حسین نصر (The Maryamiyya, from Frithjof Schuon to Seyyed Hossein Nasr). The book is available online in pdf format here.

Shahbazi is a respected Iranian historian, who has also published on the rise and fall of the Pahlavi dynasty and on twentieth-century Marxism. He was the founding director of the Political Studies and Research Institute.

In the introduction to his book, Shahbazi says that it is based mostly on my Against the Modern World and on this blog, and also on the internet publications of Mark Koslow. The book is 247 pages long in the pdf version, and to judge from the table of contents follows a more or less standard path, though it has some less usual chapters--on Max Muller, the Baha'is, and Vali Reza Nasr. It seems to give special prominence to nudity, sex and related topics.

Nasr's autobiography (plus)

Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Ramin Jahanbegloo have published a book that is part Traditionalism, part Nasr's autobiography: In Search of the Sacred: A Conversation with Seyyed Hossein Nasr on his Life and Thought (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010).

The first 138 pages cover Nasr's life from childhood through his education in America, the establishment of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in Tehran, the revolution, and then on to his career in exile in America. The remainder of the book covers Tradition, the Sacred, modernity, Art, and Sufism. Guénon, Coomaraswamy, and Schuon are mentioned frequently, but the Maryamiyya is not.

Traditionalism and Fascism

The post on Nasr and the Shah has generated a certain amount of discussion (not all of it on topic, but still). Abdul-Halim V. wrote:

somehow Perennialism/Traditionalism seems to be associated to elitist and Fascist tendancies. Is that an accident? Are there thinkers out there who are serious thoughtful Perennialists but who are also progressive and democratic?

There are "progressive" perennialists, but I have not heard of many "progressive" Traditionalists. This is presumably because Guénon saw progress as an illusion, an important point with which few (if any) later Traditionalists have disagreed. This does not mean, however, that all Traditionalists have gone to the other extreme and become fascists. Many are not particularly interested in politics, progressive, fascist, or centrist.

There is an important political stream within Traditionalism, though, which follows Julius Evola and Alexander Dugin, and has often been described as "fascist," though I myself prefer a label such as "new right" or "far right." This has only limited implications for the spiritual Traditionalism represented by people such as S. H. Nasr, however. Since the 1920s, political Traditionalism has developed separately from other varieties of Traditionalism. Certainly, both spiritual and political Traditionalism ultimately derive from Guénon, even though Guénon himself had little interest in politics. But both S. H. Nasr and Sayyid Qutb ultimately derive from the Prophet Muhammad, without having anything much to do with each other.

Nasr and the Shah

Many Iranians have never quite understood why Nasr remained so faithful to the Shah even in the last years of his reign, when the costs of Nasr’s faithfulness were becoming so great. I suggested various reasons in my Against the Modern World, but a correspondent has just drawn my attention to a reason I never considered. Nasr, it is suggested, agreed with Schuon that “kingship flows from an archetype but presidency does not.” “The worst king is better than the best president.”

Nasr in Iran

The Sixth Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies in London went well--dominated, as one might expect, by scholars from Iran or the Iranian diaspora. The interest there in my paper on "The International Ramifications of the Thought of Seyyed Hossein Nasr" showed to what extent interest him (and so in traditionalism) in Iran is still continuing to grow.

(I'm now back in Cairo and will try to attend to this blog more often).

Paper announcement: The International Ramifications of the Thought of Seyyed Hossein Nasr

One of the organizers of the Sixth Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies asked me to contribute a paper on "The International Ramifications of the Thought of Seyyed Hossein Nasr," which I will be doing at SOAS in London on August 4. The panel is entitled "Influence of Iranian Religious Thought Outside Iran," and also features papers on "Ali Shariati in South Africa" and "(Still) Exporting The Iranian Revolution." Who is missing? Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, perhaps... Unusual company for Dr Nasr to keep, but in some ways appropriate.